Fiber Makes the Upgrades Easy

By: John Shepler

Fiber optic bandwidth has long been a standard of business connectivity, especially for applications requiring extreme line speeds. The good news now is that fiber service is becoming available to more and more business locations. IT managers and other executives are increasingly faced with the choice of whether to continue embracing their legacy copper wireline services or make the upgrade to fiber optic service. Let’s see what helps tilt the balance in favor of fiber.


First of all, Fiber is the Future
You can easily read the signs that point in this direction. Fiber optic bandwidth has gone from being an extremely expensive option to being price competitive with copper on a per Mbps basis. Bonded T1 and Ethernet over Copper will only take you so far in satisfying an accelerating need for MAN and WAN bandwidth. When copper runs out of capability, fiber is often the only solution.

Copper Asset Retirement
You’ll also notice the media stories of how carriers are either phasing out their copper assets or planning to do so. The change has been slow in coming because all that buried and overhead copper is already paid for. However, maintenance is not free. Corroding copper wires result in frequent truck rolls. Some of the justification for holding onto the copper plant is the preponderance of legacy analog phone lines plus T1 and ISDN trunks that use the same twisted pair lines. As carriers transition from circuit switched to packet switched architectures, those analog and TDM circuits start to fade away.

Ethernet over Fiber
The new juggernaut is Ethernet over Fiber. It’s a combination that meets a lot of needs. Fiber provides the bandwidth capacity. Ethernet offers its inherent support for IP networking. Ethernet also has some new standardized services available. E-LAN or Ethernet LAN service is becoming the easiest and most cost effective way to link multiple business locations in a meshed any-to-any communications architecture. The designed-in ease of scalability with Ethernet over Fiber is a huge boon for companies that want to minimize their costs in an uncertain business climate.

SONET, the Legacy Fiber
The legacy competing fiber service is SONET, a technology designed by and for the phone companies. SONET has predetermined bandwidth levels that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps and OC-48 at 2.4 Gbps. The terminal equipment is specific to these levels, so changes require truck rolls for the carriers to swap out customer premises equipment and perhaps make engineering changes to the network. Delays of weeks and months for system changes are not unusual.

Ethernet Scalability
Ethernet over Fiber doesn’t operate at fixed bandwidth levels. Instead, there is a maximum bandwidth capability determined by the installed port speed. Popular port options include 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gbps 10 GigE. The beauty of this arrangement is that you can install a Gigabit Ethernet port, but only order a couple hundred Mbps of initial bandwidth. When your line starts to reach its capacity, a simple phone call to your provider can double or quadruple bandwidth in a matter of hours or days. No hardware changes are needed.

Ethernet Cost Advantage
You should also be aware that Ethernet over Fiber usually has a cost advantage over SONET. Competitive carriers with their own IP core networks can completely bypass the incumbent telephone companies and give you point to point or dedicated Internet connections. You may well find that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same money that you pay now or cut your monthly telecom bill in half.

Here’s Why Companies Actually Want BYOD

By: John Shepler

Do you wince when someone brings up the topic of BYOD or Bring Your Own Device? It can be more than an ulcer producer for IT managers. The whole company’s intellectual property can be put at risk by employees blissfully aware of the threats. They bring in what they want and connect it to the company network. Your carefully planned security protocols go out the window. What to do?

Most companies have drawn a clear line between what belongs to the company and what belongs to the individual. Unable to manage the wild and wooly world of consumer electronics configurations, they simply lay down the law and say you can’t use your personal phone, laptop or tablet for company business. But since you clearly need technology to do your job, something has to give. In frustration, the company issues you a corporate smartphone, laptop or tablet that are only used for business. Does that put the issue to rest?

Oh, not really. Smaller companies can’t afford to pony up the capital to hand out gadgets to everyone who needs or wants them. They may simply wince and take their chances that nothing will go horribly wrong. Larger operations install firewalls and other means to protect key information and hope they will be a bulwark against data going out and intruders coming in. Meanwhile, employees continue to casually use their own equipment, both inside and outside the company, for business activities.

Why? Partly because it’s more convenient. Also because everybody likes what they’ve customized for their own use. They don’t want to be carrying two copies of everything and switching back and forth. They don’t want to have to mentally jog between different hardware and different operating systems. It’s just not human nature.

Is there anyway to bridge this gulf and make everybody happy? One answer may be found in the new XO WorkTime service. It’s a cloud based UC (Unified Communications) application that integrates your company’s communications systems with employee smartphones and laptops. In effect, the personal devices become access devices to the same resources provided within the corporate walls.

So, here’s why you actually want BYOD… as long as you keep it under your control with an app like XO WorkTime. The first big advantage is capital investment. Why should you as a company manager spend thousands or millions of dollars to build and manage a pool of equipment when your employees will do that for you at their expense. You don’t have to buy them a smartphone because they’ve already bought their own iPhone or Android smartphone.

The next big advantage is happier employees. You’re no longer on their case about turning off their personal gadgets inside the company. Less nagging, less spying, less scolding and everybody’s in a better mood. It gets even better when employees realize that they have their desk phones on their personal phones. They can roam at will and be connected with other employees and customers effortlessly.

Here’s how this works. Your company needs to be using XO’s VoIP service internally. These include IP Flex, IP Flex with VPN, SIP, Enterprise SIP and Hosted PBX services. You simply install the XO WorkTime application on every device that needs it. At that point employee devices have a dual personality. They are work phones and they are personal phones.

The personal side remains unchanged. Personal apps and information are the same as they were. They also remain outside of the company side of the WorkTime app. What happens on the personal side stays on the personal side.

What happens on the business side also stays on the business side. You can safely transport business communications using encryption and VPN tunneling. Your company applications stay in a secure, password protected environment.

Employees have their business calling plan and office number while they are in WorkTime mode. They’ll use the same calling features they use in the office from the WorkTime applications while on the go. That includes features such as simultaneous ring on desk, smartphone or home computer plus presence, IM and video. On-net, local and inbound calls are free. Long distance calls are included in the company plan and don’t count against your personal minutes.

Are you frustrated with the cost and security problems related to enabling mobile business communications? Get expert consulting to learn more about how XO WorkTime and other sophisticated hosted VoIP services can work to your advantage.

Fixed Wireless Broadband Services For Business

We’ve come to think of business grade telecom services and copper wireline and fiber optic services. That’s why IT managers may cringe when someone says they’ve got to have new high bandwidth Internet access, point to point transmission or VoIP telephone service right this minute. We all know that there is no such thing in WAN networking as right this minute. Or is there?

An option that’s becoming increasingly available is fixed wireless service. Think of getting the same bandwidth services you have now delivered without the wires. This is quite different from cell phone service designed for mobile use or wireless access points that have a range of only a few hundred feet. It’s also not satellite broadband, which has such long latencies and limited bandwidth that you can’t really use it for any but the most limited applications.

This fixed wireless service uses outside antennas that communicate over a range of some miles. Airband, a leader in this field, has installed base stations in 14 major cities. Each base station can communicate with customers up to 5 miles away, forming a service footprint of 78 square miles. Each customer has a subscriber unit (SU) that provides a two-way radio connection with the base station and a simple Ethernet connection to the LAN.

What services can Airband offer? Broadband Internet is a popular choice. You can get speeds from 2 Mbps to Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, you can get replacement service for T1 lines and DS3 connections. But there is also the standard Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps. Plus you can choose any bandwidth in-between to scale your service to exactly what you need. Don’t worry about picking the wrong bandwidth level and needing an upgrade quickly. Upgrades are made by network software changes and can be accomplished in hours. Installation itself can be completed in just days. What’s that quote you got to bring in fiber? Six months? Outrageous!

Being wireless, can’t anyone just stick up an antenna and intercept your datastream? They won’t have much luck. Airband uses 128 bit AES encryption to keep your data safe. They also offer a 100% uptime guarantee, with service level guarantees on jitter, latency and packet loss.

With such tight control on network parameters, this fixed wireless solution can be used with confidence for VoIP as well as point to point data, business Internet and private IP VPN. There are several options available. You can simply replace your existing ISDN PRI trunk lines (or add new ones) using a SIP trunk with PRI interface. The newer IP PBX systems can often connect directly to a SIP trunk. Or let Airband own and manage the hosted PBX system and just have telephone sets at your location. This is all done on a private IP network so that the quality of your voice communication is assured.

Does this sound like the quality of service you need with the speed of installation and avoidance of copper and fiber line construction costs you require? If so, you may be delighted with how little you have to pay to enjoy fixed wireless services from Airband and other providers. Get details on fixed wireless costs and availability now.

The Many Flavors of Ethernet Transport

The availability of Ethernet for MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) transport is popping up all over. Why? Simply because Ethernet is in demand by IT and telecommunications managers looking to get the most Megabits per second at the lowest price for their companies. Ethernet also offers easier management. Multiple locations can be tied together as a large single network.

The very best situation is a direct fiber optic connection from a competitive carrier's point of presence (POP) to your premises. A large national carrier, such as XO communications, can provide first mile connectivity, transport throughout your metro area, and long haul service across the country. Ethernet over Fiber, or EoF, on a carrier designed for IP transport is highly efficient and results in cost savings far beyond what you may be expecting.

But what if you aren't lucky enough to be in a major office complex located in a metropolitan downtown area, just blocks from carrier facilities and already provisioned or "lit" for fiber optic service? Ah, that's were the creative solutions come in.

Ethernet has been widely implemented as a baseband technology for LAN networks. This means that rather than multiplexing the Ethernet signal on a carrier of any sort, it occupies the entire bandwidth of the cabling that carries it. This is still reflected in terms like 10 Base T or 100 Base T. the word "base" refers to baseband. The Ethernet signal is actually packets of information, each carrying up to 1500 bytes of user data.

Once you want to transport your LAN traffic over longer distances than local area network connections, it needs to be carried by a signal or "carrier" that can travel long distances. Actually, just about any digital communications system can carry the individual Ethernet packets as long as it has enough speed or bandwidth to be worthwhile. That includes the T-Carrier system developed by the phone companies to transport digitized phone calls, SONET (Synchronous Optical NETwork) fiber optic carriers, microwave relay and WiFi radios, and point to point optical lasers.

The T-Carriers are especially useful because they've been deployed all over the country and are a mature technology of the phone companies. T1 is the most familiar of the T-Carriers. It is the defacto standard for PBX telephone, dedicated Internet and point to point data transfers for small and medium sized companies. T1 lines are provisioned on twisted pair copper wire. In other words, phone lines. So, T1 lines go everywhere. Using protocol conversion to get packets to and from T1 frames, T1 lines can carry Ethernet. This is often referred to as Ethernet over T1( EoT1) or Ethernet over DS1 (EoDS1). DS1 is the definition of the Data Signal or framing specification for T1 lines.

A related service is Ethernet over DS3, EoDS3. DS3 is the Data Signal level for T3 lines that is also used for SONET fiber optic service. DS1 offers 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth, just a fraction of standard 10 Mbps Ethernet. DS3, however, offers 45 Mbps of bandwidth, almost half of a 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet signal.

When Ethernet is provisioned on T1 twisted pair or T3 coaxial cable, it may be referred to as EoC or Ethernet over Copper. There are other short distance modulation schemes that offer higher bandwidths using in-place copper wiring for that last mile or few hundred feet of connectivity. The big advantage of copper is that it is likely already in place for phone service. Fiber optic carriers offer higher bandwidths to easily support 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps Ethernet transport, but the cost of construction may be prohibitive unless you are near a carrier POP or are willing to commit to large bandwidth usage.

Which business bandwidth services make the most sense for your organization? Find out which nearby locations are already provisioned for Ethernet service and let our expert consultants help you find the most cost effective services for your needs.